Stars Remember Birch and Berries
by Leeson
Summary: She doesn't remember her life before the one she now leads. GGBonesVM crossover, short and crazy.


**Stars Remember Birch and Berries (1/1)  
She doesn't remember her life before the one she now leads.  
I do not own the characters or universe depicted.**

She doesn't remember her life before the one she now leads. She doesn't remember a life before her husband and her children and her job as an English teacher. She remembers bits and pieces. She looks like her mother, she knows that much. Her husband is not her first love, nor the love of her life. Despite how it seems, she remembers that she wasn't pregnant, or a mother at age twenty-two. She remembers a fondness for literature and boys with hair she ran her fingers through and eyes that loved her.

She remembers less every day. Every morning, she wakes up and remembers differently than the day before. Today she woke up and stopped remembering that she looked like her mother. She remembers it different, now, and doesn't even realize. She remembers her mother died when she was fourteen, and had fiery red hair and eyes the colour of chocolate frosting.

She doesn't know any of this.

She remembers, vaguely, that her husband is not her husband, either, as her children are not her children.

She doesn't know if her husband remembers. She has his name, though, and so she lives as Lorelai Leigh Booth. It's ugly and she thinks any name would fit better. She realizes this in a pithy thought, as there are far worse things about him than his name, Seeley Booth. He doesn't talk or touch or breathe if she's in his presence. She thinks he knows she remembers.

She thinks he's behind her remembering.

She's wrong. He remembers just like she does, and then he forgets the same way. He used to remember a beautiful brunette with a name he could never recall and a penchant for driving him crazy.

She teaches English and he crunches numbers. Certified Public Accountant means nothing when you don't know the simple equations of life, though, she thinks.

"How was work?" she asks every night as they sit down for a meal she spent at least two hours preparing. He responds cordially, with no anecdotes or extra words, and asks in kind.

She spends the rest of dinner talking about work, about the kids and about the recipe she made for dinner.

One day, though, he wakes up and kisses her full on the mouth. He touches her and breathes and talks and she thinks he's finally forgotten whatever he remembered, she's assured that he is not conspiring against her and does not steal her memories, or fail to satiate her while someone else does. That night, he goes in depth on his day at work, he complements her cooking, he talks to the children and he makes love to her without thinking about another woman with brown hair and gray eyes.

In the morning, she doesn't remember boys with hair she could run her fingers through and eyes that loved her, but she's awoken to something similar: a man she can touch and eyes that are trying to love her. She settles for it, because there's nothing better being offered.

He treats her like a princess, loves the children and insists that July should be spent somewhere with tequila in coconuts. She has no idea what that means, but she agrees to it because if he's happy, it means she's on the way.

The first day of August, back from a vacation that didn't involve coconuts, just a lot of tequila, she wakes up happy. She remembers nothing about before. There's nothing in her mind but manufactured memories.

But then there's a man at the door, calls her Rory, says she has to go with him. Says tons of ludicrous things.

"Go away! Who are you? Why are you doing this?"

He won't. He's Jess. He's her age but he looks eighteen and, when Seeley asks, she says that Jess is a student that's telling her about his creative writing assignment. The three of them sit in her kitchen and Jess tells the ludicrous story in more relatable terms.

In a fiction story.

A story where a girl named Sarah is a prisoner of the government. She found out too much and now she has no real past and she's married to someone she never met and has fake children and, one day, a stranger shows up on her step and tells her about her life before. About life in a beautiful little hamlet with a beautiful, obnoxious mother and an unhealthy love of coffee.

The stranger tells Sarah her mother, her real mother, is buried in a cemetery Lorelai Leigh Booth has never heard of. A woman named the same as her daughter, with the last name Gilmore and no epithet on her gravestone.

The stranger leaves Sarah alone and Lorelai Leigh Booth has never been to Connecticut in her life, but she goes because the stranger told Sarah to.

And there's a stone engraved with Lorelai Victoria Gilmore and two dates, nothing else. He's there and he wants her to cry, to remember.

Seeley kisses her when she gets home, forgives her for the lateness, tell her that he kept dinner warm for her.

They make love and he falls asleep while she thinks about days spent in prep school and a diner and a little house with fairy lights all year round and an effervescent woman with too much charisma and beauty to be bound to the Earth.

The next morning, Seeley finds his wife cooking breakfast in the kitchen.

"Veronica," he intones. He offers to finish breakfast as the kids come into the room. They make breakfast and eat it and Seeley goes to work. Veronica drops the kids off at the sitters and finishes her way to her job as an English teacher, never noticing the diversion from her normal schedule of sleuthing and the difference between the man she went to bed with and the one she woke up with.


End file.
